Recent Posts

Eating Your Water Bottle

Over the past month, I have been seeing a lot of videos about the new edible water bottle. We all know that plastic bottles are very harmful to our environment since they take hundreds of years to decompose. For years now, environmentalists have been encouraging consumers to stop buying plastic bottles but, instead, for them to switch to alternatives like reusable bottles or water fountains. Their efforts have not been very effective, though. Annually, the United States uses over 50 million plastic bottles. Of these, around 80% and their life in a landfill.

Seeing this as a problem, many people have been trying to discover a solution. The solution may have been found by three men from the Imperial College of London with their new innovation, the edible water. The edible container is made from seaweed. In encases the water which can be consumed by popping the entire blob into your mouth or simply poking a hole in the surface layer. This idea arose in 2014 and has just recently been completed thanks to their crowdfunding campaign that raised over $1 million.

There are still several challenges the inventors need to overcome before they are able to seriously contend with plastic bottles. Though the packaging is cheaper to manufacture than plastic edges two cents each, it may take a while for consumers to become accustomed to the texture of the covering. Also, since you only get a gulp of water with each edible container, you must consume multiple bubbles to fully quench your thirst. Another issue is coming up with packaging that is eco-friendly for the bubbles to be transported in that will keep them clean and intact. Consumers may also be concerned about the bubbles creating splatter as they bite into them. Hopefully, these issues can be quickly resolved so we can begin the process of eliminating plastic waste from our landfills.